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Plenty of Jobs, for the Right Skills

TRACI TAPANI is not your usual C.E.O. For the last 19 years, she and her
sister have been co-presidents of Wyoming Machine, a sheet metal
company they inherited from their father in Stacy, Minn. I met Tapani at
a meeting convened by the Minnesota Department of Employment and
Economic Development to discuss one of its biggest challenges today:
finding the skilled workers that employers need to run local businesses.
I’ll let Tapani take it from here:

“About 2009,” she explained, “when the economy was collapsing and there
was a lot of unemployment, we were working with a company that got a
contract to armor Humvees,” so her 55-person company “had to hire a lot
of people. I was in the market looking for 10 welders. I had lots and
lots of applicants, but they did not have enough skill to meet the
standard for armoring Humvees. Many years ago, people learned to weld in
a high school shop class or in a family business or farm, and they came
up through the ranks and capped out at a certain skill level. They did
not know the science behind welding,” so could not meet the new
standards of the U.S. military and aerospace industry.

“They could make beautiful welds,” she said, “but they did not
understand metallurgy, modern cleaning and brushing techniques” and how
different metals and gases, pressures and temperatures had to be
combined. Moreover, in small manufacturing businesses like hers,
explained Tapani, “unlike a Chinese firm that does high-volume, low-tech
jobs, we do a lot of low-volume, high-tech jobs, and each one has its
own design drawings. So a welder has to be able to read and understand
five different design drawings in a single day.”